Articles Posted in Medical Trends

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Doctors are trained to diagnose and treat symptoms of illness. Patients come to their doctors with preconceived notions of how they should be medically treated, knowledge gleaned from the plethora of medical information readily available to all on the Internet, books and magazines. More and more patients are finding a gap between their expectations and the reality of their doctor visits.

Some doctors admit that they are squeezed for time, pinched by the insurance company’s scrutiny of their submitted reimbursements and pushed to see more patients by their employers and/or partners. The system no longer allows for lengthy, one-on-one visits with your doctor. The result is that more and more patients report that they simply do not trust their physician.

But what can we do to force our doctor to focus on us? To assert our visit is important and demands his or her full attention and expertise? Do we need to lobby for different rules governing the system? Do we need to pay by the minute so that a physician will review our case until we are satisfied?
There is no need to go to such extremes. By adjusting how you, the patient, approaches the visit you can ensure that you are getting the most out of your doctor.

Patients should be encouraged to enter the exam room with a written list of questions for the doctor they are seeing. And you should insist that the doctor give the necessary time to answer each question. I know of several friends and family members who go to important medical consultations with written questions and a video camera to make sure the answers are well documented for further reflection or to allow for a comparative second or third opinion. Whatever method you use it is important that you are in control of your medical care.

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Recent studies have exposed inconsistent and inaccurate results of breast tissues tested for cancer, which has led to the misdiagnosis of cancer. The most troubling aspect is that thousands of women may have failed to receive the proper treatment because of errors in two laboratory tests.

One of these laboratory tests is Her-2, which is used to help determine how aggressive a breast cancer tumor is. The test is done not to diagnose cancer, but to help decide on the proper treatment course once breast cancer has already been diagnosed. If the test is positive then the patient likely has an aggressive tumor that will not only respond poorly to hormone treatment, but to chemotherapy as well.

So these patient will then be treated with Herceptin therapy. Herceptin is an FDA-approved drug that works at slowing the growth of aggressive tumors and at destroying cancerous cells. However, in order to be a candidate for this type of treatment one must first test Her-2 positive because the drug only focuses on Her-2 genes.

The introduction of this drug was a breakthrough- by focusing on a subset of cancer patients the drug was more specific and thereby more effective for its subset. However, because one must first be diagnosed as Her-2 positive before receiving the drug it is crucial that Her-2 testing is accurate. And right now that isn’t the case.

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